Mask Market Page 12

  “We can take a ride out and see him,” I offered. Quickly, before the fuse burned down to the TNT.

  No point in telling the Mole we were coming. He’s got a phone, but he never answers it if he’s working, and he’s just about always working.

  Michelle fumed at me all the way. She’d been building her mood from the moment I told her we didn’t have time to stop at her place to let her change outfits, and hadn’t let up since. I ignored her—easy enough, since she was putting so much effort into ignoring me.

  I slid one of my custom CDs into the slot, and let the music drift over us, tugging at the buried blossoms. Chuck Willis, “Don’t Deceive Me.” Johnny Shines swearing “My Love Can’t Hide.” Sonny Boy’s “Cross My Heart.” Timothea’s “I’m Still Standing.” Champion Jack’s version of “Goin’ Down Slow,” the one he called “Failing Health Blues.” By the time the CD got to the lush black velvet of Charles Brown’s “Early in the Morning,” my baby sister was back to herself.

  “That young boy”—she meant Clarence, who was a long way from that now but, being younger than her, had to be a teenager, at most—“just wanted an excuse to see that woman,” she said, smiling now.

  “The Dragon Lady? She’s married.”

  Michelle’s the only woman I ever knew who can make a snort sound feminine.

  “Fine,” is all I had in response.

  “Burke, you know Mole will come up with something.”

  “It’s not that, girl. No one respects the Mole’s stuff more than me. I was just thinking of something Wolfe told me.”

  “Her? What would you even—?”

  “Enough, okay? Just listen,” I said, as I wheeled the Plymouth off the Bruckner onto Hunts Point Avenue, heading for the badlands. “I thought I had a deal with her crew. Do a little surveillance on the address we had, see if they could get me a photo. Or anything that would lock it down as Charlie’s address. Then Wolfe pulled them off. She said it was because they just do paper stuff, no agents in the field. But there was something else going on, and I think I know what it is. Charlie Jones might not be much on his own, but anyone who tightropes over an alligator pit for a living gets to know the alligators pretty good after a while.”

  “That’s right. I wouldn’t want him…”

  “I know it, honey. That’s why I didn’t go running to the Mole right away, see?”

  “Yes,” she said, crossing her legs. “I’m sorry. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “It’s fine,” I soothed her. “We’ll just…consult him, okay?”

  Her smile was a floodlight.

  We rolled through the badlands, while I thought about how it was probably the last piece of real estate in New York that hadn’t been gobbled up for new construction. Not yet, anyway. With the tidal wave of property-greed crashing over the city, some Trump-oid was going to find the money—other people’s money—to renovate the barren prairie sooner or later. As we made the turn to the Mole’s junkyard, I pointed out a prowl car, parked in the shadow of what had once been a building.

  “ROAD officers,” I said to Michelle.

  “What are those?”

  “Retired on Active Duty,” I told her. “It’s a good spot for cops like that. Plenty of crime, but no citizens to report it. They need something for their activity sheets, they can always bust one of the prosties working the trucks out of the Meat Market.”

  “Very nice,” she said, stiffly. Michelle had worked the streets for years, when she was still pre-op. She still had a working girl’s mind: hated the cops, feared the johns.

  I’d known my little sister since we’d been kids. I was older; she was smarter. I was stronger; she was quicker. The only times we were apart was when I was Inside, or she was. She’d been distance-dancing with the Mole for years before they ever got together.

  What finally pushed them over the bridge to each other was the same thing that got Michelle off the streets and onto the phones. Love. Not the love they had for each other—that had been there since the minute they met, arcing between them like electricity, searing the air. No, this was love for a kid. A little kid who’d been turned out before he ever got to kindergarten. I’d snatched him from a pimp in Times Square, back when that part of town was a festering pus pit.

  I hadn’t thought things through, just did what I used to do all the time back then—hurt the pimp, took the kid. But this wasn’t a kid I could take back to his parents: That’s who the pimp had bought him from.

  While I was still running through options in my head, Michelle had already adopted the boy, pulling him to her in the back seat of my car. She hadn’t let go since.

  Terry was her boy—hers and the Mole’s. The kid had his father’s nuclear mind and his mother’s titanium delicacy. His real father’s, his real mother’s.

  I nosed the Plymouth against the rusting barbed wire that wound through the chain-linked entrance to the Mole’s junkyard like flesh-tearing ivy. I knew the motion detectors would have already set LEDs flashing where the Mole could see them.

  Maybe there was a hidden dog whistle, too. The pack assembled like it always did, moving with the slow and easy confidence of an inexorable force. I looked for Simba, feeling a needle poised above my heart. The ancient warrior was about a hundred years old; one day he wouldn’t answer the bell for the next round. Just as I felt my throat close, I spotted his triangular head cutting through the mob like a barracuda parting a school of guppies. The pack was silent except for a couple of yips from the young ones who hadn’t learned how to act yet.

  “Simba!” I called out. “Simba-witz!”

  The old beast looked at me, white-whiskered face as impassive as ever. His eyes were filmy with age, but one shredded ear shot up as he tracked my voice, ran it through his memory banks. He gave out a short half-bark of greeting just as the Mole lumbered up and began unlocking the back part of the sally port.

  The Mole drove from the gate back to his bunker. I wasn’t worried about letting him behind the wheel of my Plymouth: The tiger-trap potholes would keep his speed down to a crawl, and he could see well enough in daylight, even with the trademark Coke-bottle lenses covering his faded-denim eyes.

  Simba and I walked back together, the pack at a respectful distance.

  “We’ve still got it, don’t we, boy?” I said.

  Far as I was concerned, he nodded.

  As usual, the Mole was miserly with his words. But he listened good. When I was done, he said, “Why does he matter?”

  “Charlie?”

  “Yes. Either he is no danger to you, or he does not know where to find you.”

  “Because, if he was a danger, he would have already moved on me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Charlie middlemanned a meet between me and this guy who wanted me to find a woman. The guy left to get something from his car. A team boxed him in, and just gunned him down. They didn’t ask any questions, didn’t even search the body. They knew who they wanted, and what they had to do.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe Charlie’s found himself another line of work.”

  “As a Judas,” Michelle said.

  “Even if that is so, it wasn’t Burke he betrayed,” the Mole said, reasonably.

  “There’s a hundred other possibilities,” I said, lamely. “I just want to talk to him.”

  The Mole gave me a look.

  “You have a photograph?”

  “I’ve got nothing,” I told him. “And a physical description wouldn’t do any good—it’d fit a million guys. All we’ve got is that address I told you about. If it’s still good, he spent a long time building that nest. That’d give us something to bargain with.”

  “So you want a photograph?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Couldn’t you hook up some kind of—?” Michelle started to say, but I cut her off with: “No, honey. Now that I think about it, Wolfe’s right. Surveillance isn’t the way to go. No way we could put a stranger into a neighborhood like that, it’s
too—”

  It was the Mole’s turn to interrupt. “I know,” he said.

  We were all quiet for a couple of minutes. Fine with me. I liked sitting out there in the fresh sunlight, my hand resting on the back of Simba’s neck.

  “You have one of those new phones?” the Mole asked Michelle. “One that takes pictures?”

  “Mais oui,” she said, insulted that anyone would think she was a fraction of an inch off the cutting edge…of anything.

  “Everybody has them now,” the Mole said, as if Michelle had just made his point.

  “So it wouldn’t make Charlie nervous, seeing one,” I said, picking up the thread.

  “No,” the Mole said in a voice of finality. Then he launched into a string of Yiddish. The only word I recognized was landsman.

  The bistro was called Le Goome. Before I could say a word, a guy who looked like he should be bouncing in a waterfront dive—except for the lavender satin shirt with the first three buttons undone to display a hairless swatch of chest—walked over, said, “Mr. Compton, yes?” His voice was right out of a cellblock.

  “That’s me,” I told him.

  “Michelle is very special to us,” he said, making it sound like a warning. “We have a lovely, private table for you, away from the window, yes?”

  “That’ll be great.”

  “And the lady?”

  “Her name is Sophia. She’s tall, with—”

  “She’ll ask for you, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll bring her to you, sir,” he said, about as servile as a bull elephant during mating season.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, as I got up to greet her.

  “Don’t give it a thought.”

  The waiter was androgynous, of no apparent age, wearing a lavender satin shirt. Maybe it was a theme.

  “I always feel guilty in a place like this,” she said. “I eat so little, and they charge so much.”

  “Food’s just fuel,” I told her. “People come to places like this for the experience.”

  “Oh, that’s just right!”

  I made a toasting gesture with my glass of vitamin water, telling her I was glad she agreed, but I was done talking….

  She got it as if I’d spelled it out in neon. “I know you must want this,” she said, sliding a folded piece of paper across to me.

  I opened it. One glance and I knew it was a dud. Jeremy Preston’s last known address was care of a law firm in Manhattan. They might know where he was now, but they wouldn’t be telling if they did.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, telling me she knew what she’d given me was useless.

  “That’s okay,” I told her. “I might be able to work with this. My company’s no stranger to lawyers.”

  “It was just an excuse,” she said, looking down at her French manicure.

  “I’m glad,” I said, lying.

  By early evening, the Ralph P. Compton number had been nuked, the phone itself sledgehammered and tossed into a vacant lot. A new name was in the slot at the office building. Michelle’s lavender-shirted pal would respond to any questions with the blank look he’d probably learned in reform school.

  And if I’d guessed wrong on the range of security cameras at Sophia’s house, and Hauser ever got a call about his license number, he’d pass a polygraph that he’d left the car at the station that morning, and it was right there waiting for him when he returned.

  But all of that was reflex—I knew Sophia wasn’t going to be looking for me. Just the opposite. She’d had her sad little adventure; Ralph would get the message when she never called again.

  Of course, she couldn’t be 100 percent sure that Ralph wouldn’t come looking for her. Get angry, demand an explanation, insist on seeing her again. That would have frightened some women, but not Sophia. Action like that would have buzzed her neurons. She was a junkie who needed a risk-fix every so often. And Ralph Compton had disqualified himself.

  “You know what I always wanted to do?” she’d said, walking around the hotel room like she was thinking of buying it.

  “This?” I guessed aloud, giving her the chance to pretend this was her first time with a stranger, if she wanted it.

  She didn’t. “Did you ever do it outside?”

  “You mean, like, in a car? When I was—”

  “No. No, that’s not outside. I mean, like…we came up in the elevator, but there’s stairs, too, aren’t there?”

  “There have to be. In case there’s a—”

  “We could go out there,” she said, leaning back against the wall. “It would be so…exciting. Why do you think I wore this skirt? I could just…” She slowly turned her back, tugged at the hem. By then, I wasn’t surprised to see she was naked beneath it.

  Part of me wanted to tell her I never had sex indoors until I was a grown man. Alleys, cars, rooftops—that’s where kids like us got it on. One girl I had was so much shorter than me that I used to stand her one step higher on the stairs, come into her from behind.

  I didn’t tell Sophia that. And I didn’t tell her about the sex I didn’t want. When I was small, when I couldn’t stop them from doing whatever they wanted with their property. Not their property, actually—I belonged to the State. But the State was always very generous about loaning out its possessions.

  No, I just told her doing it outside the hotel room was too much for me. She’d almost walked out then, disgusted. But I guess she figured she’d already made the trip, so…

  That night, I paid another installment on the malaria I’d bought with my stupidity so long ago. Fever dream. They come when they want to, but less and less over the years. Usually, they’re just jungle visions: running, pieces of earth blowing up in chunks, blood in the ears so thick you can’t hear the gunfire, fear rising like ground fog, clouding your eyes and imprisoning your mind. Sometimes the location shifts. I’m not always in a jungle. But that ground fog is always there, hungry.

  I was my old self in the dream. I mean, I looked like I did before my face got rearranged. It was years ago—I knew that because I was in the downtown meat-packing district at night, and it was deserted. So it had to be before the place turned itself into Club-ville, like it is now.

  I parked my car—my old car, a 1970 Plymouth four-door sedan so plain it made vanilla look exotic—off Gansevoort Street and started walking. It was as if I was watching from behind myself—I could see with my eyes, but I couldn’t see my face.

  There was no music to the movie. It was like watching a man in an aquarium.

  “You looking for a date, mister?”

  I saw a girl’s face, peeking around the corner like she was playing hide-and-go-seek. Not one of the tranny hookers who had made the area their personal stroll; this was an XX-chromosome package. I remember thinking, How do I know that? But I never answered my own question.

  She was under five feet, way short of a hundred pounds. Wearing a baggy pink sweatshirt over jeans and pink sneakers. Her hair was in pigtails. A teenager, trying to look even younger.

  “Maybe,” I said, to bring her closer. “Would it be an expensive one?”

  “That depends on what you want to do on your date,” she said, biting her lower lip and looking a question at me in the darkness.

  “You have a place?” I asked her.

  “It’s a nice night out,” she answered, as if she’d been expecting the question. “And back here”—she shot an unrounded hip in the direction of the alley she’d come from—“it’s real private.”

  “I don’t…”

  “Oh, you’ll love it, mister. You don’t have to get undressed or anything.” She stepped closer. “Just let me take it out. A man built like you, I’ll bet you’ve got a big cock.”

  I had her then, left hand clamped on the back of her neck.

  She didn’t panic. “All I have to do is scream,” she said, calmly. “My man’s back there, and he’s a real—”

  “Scream,” I said, pulling my .357 Mag loose.

  �
�Oh God!” she said, very, very softly. “You’re a cop, aren’t you? Please, please, please, please, please.”

  “Just come with me,” I said, watching the mouth of the alley.

  “Please, please, please.” She was crying with her voice, but her eyes were dry.

  “Please what?”

  “I can do it in your car. I’ll suck your cock until it explodes,” she whispered against me, groping with her hand.

  I turned slightly, guarding my groin.

  “No, no, no, mister. I just wanted to show you how good I can be. Come on, please. I always wanted to suck off a cop. You see how good I am, you’ll come back, right? Anytime you want, I’ll be right here.”

  “Come on,” I said, clamping down a little tighter to get her moving.

  “Please!” she hissed at me. “It doesn’t have to be like that. I’ll do anything, mister. I’ll take it in the ass, if you want. Anything.”

  “You’re not being arrested,” I told her. “I’m just going to take you—”

  “No!” the girl begged. “Please. I never did anything to you, did I? And I’ll do anything you want. Anything. Just don’t take me back.”

  “Back where?”

  “You know,” she said, accusingly. “Back home.”

  I woke up coated in sweat. I felt a white-hot wire somewhere in my brain, writhing like a stepped-on snake.

  Unless Beryl’s father was deep underground, any of the Internet “public records search” services would turn him up in an hour. Their best customers are stalkers, and they cater to their clientele with a wide variety of options. They’ll give you access to DMV records—there’s an extra charge for states where that’s against the law—tax rolls, employment history, student-loan databases. If you want, they’ll even send you some photos of the target’s house.

  You don’t have to be a celebrity to make the list. There are humans who worship property rights. Their property. Some of them see therapists with their “abandonment issues.” Others visit a gun shop.

  All stalkers have one thing in common: a profound, overwhelming, all-encompassing sense of entitlement. Leaving them is worse than an affront; it’s an act of deadly aggression, a threat to their core. Punishment is required.